We completed our first semester drills last week. Fire drills were held August 29th at 10:25 and September 17th at 3:20. Tornado drills were held on September 3rd at 10:25 and September 12th at 3:20. A serious threat-intruder walk through drill was held September 10th at 9:01. I have taken videos of all the fire drills and tornado drills, but I don’t know a good way to post them here without putting them on YouTube.
Upload them using Google Drive.
The alarm went off at my college’s Fine Arts building today…
Why is it that I end up in more fire alarm activations on years that end on a Tuesday?!
(This same kind of thing happened to me 22 years ago on this exact date at my high school, but that one was much worse, with its Simplex 4040s on Continuous.)
Also, it turns out this was set off by yellow jackets getting into the smoke detector in the electrical room; they found a wasps’ nest in there! (Ironic; given the alarm going off was like getting stung in the ear!)
My old high school did a ‘trifecta’ drill a few weeks back. Started with a lock down drill, immediately into a tornado drill, followed by a fire drill…
It sounds like things went kind of rough… They never did them back to back when we were there, but it just feels so much less realistic to me… Like it could almost cause more problems and confusion?
Think about it: If you’re in a lock down, there’s nothing that takes priority over that (in general)… So then you send them to a tornado shelter, which would also take precedence over a fire alarm… It seems like they did it super backwards, and just ran them back to back to check the boxes rather than provide any real ‘training’ for what to do in those situations…
The school where I’m working as an in-classroom tutor had their first fire drill since I started, and also the first one under the current principal. I mentioned in another thread that it has a Gamewell-FCI system with SpectrAlert Advances. They do code 3, there’s no additional tone on the PA system, and the regular classrooms and bathrooms only have remote strobes. As expected, the horns were comparable in volume to the Wheelock AS’s I heard in grades 9-11, but more harsh and obnoxious sounding.
Fortunately for me, the new principal is notifying the staff of drills in advance (they apparently weren’t before), and he’s understanding if I want to wear earplugs or leave the building in advance due to my autism-related sensory anxiety. My role generally won’t require me to directly supervise the students in a fire drill. But I should be okay as long as I’m in a regular classroom, due to there only being remote strobes. It’s mostly the anticipation and the suddenness of the sound that can get to me, so just knowing when they are and knowing what I’m dealing with now gives me more peace of mind.
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My school keeps missing fire drills, so far we’ve only had 2 of them this year. The way it works at my school is that they happen at the last 5-10 minutes of class, so you actually have to grab your stuff. My school doesn’t even do hard lockdown drills, we only do soft lockdown ones. They were also lacking on drills my Freshmen and Sophomore years too.
My school has only had one fire drill and one lockdown drill so far, both in August. Last year, they had 3 fire drills (2 in August, 1 in February,) 3 lockdown drills (1 in August, one in October, and one in February,) and 1 tornado drill (in March.)